Arthur: Cohon's CFL on upswing, but questions remain

CFL Commissioner Mark Cohon poses with the Cup at the Commissioner's State of League Address in Toronto on Friday, November 23, 2012.

Photograph by: Sean Kilpatrick
, Canadian Press

Mark Cohon has a well-rehearsed smile, to the point where he looks overly grim when he's not grinning, but at the moment there is a reason.

The eternally youthful Cohon is in his sixth year as the commissioner of the Canadian Football League, which is a position that traditionally involves locating and manning lifeboats. When he was handed the job in 2007, his first state of the union was spent fending off what seemed like a rising NFL tide, with the Buffalo Bills about to start playing games in Toronto. "I'm not going to preside over a league that has a Grey Cup just out west," Cohon said then. "That's not what I was hired to do."

Five years later, the 100th Grey Cup has circled back to Toronto, and the 46-year-old Cohon is on something resembling a victory lap. He delivered another state of the union on Friday morning, and with upward indicators spilling out of the pockets of his three-piece suit like hundred-dollar bills. The smile is brighter than ever.

"One of the proudest moments I had in the last few weeks," he said, "is when a friend called me and said, 'Mark, the Grey Cup is everywhere." When he got to the CFL Draft -- now televised on TSN, but still a long way down the list of good news -- he said, "I remember in '07, my first Canadian draft we did, we did it live-streaming out of my office. I felt like it was Wayne's World, in the basement of Wayne's World. We have come so far."

This has long been a mom-and-pop-and-the-kids-in-the-basement league, but he's right. Cohon is seen by some as a lightweight due to his boyish face and his preternatural smoothness, but the list of accomplishments is starting to pile up.

And since he was back where he started, Cohon listed off the successes. TV ratings have doubled in five years; Hamilton and Winnipeg will have new stadiums in the next two years, while Saskatchewan, Edmonton, Montreal and B.C. have seen stadium upgrades. Ottawa will come back with its own stadium in 2014, and Cohon is already musing about the viability of a 10th team in either Moncton, Halifax, or Quebec City.

"Logically, could we get to a 10th team?" Cohon said. "I have to look at it, and say, would revenues increase, because it becomes dilutive because you have to share TV revenues, sponsorship revenues across another team. But often, does that raise the boat for the entire league, does it change the perception of the entire league, allow more sponsors. Now we could be across this country."

It's a relatively grand vision for this old league, but the revenue tide keeps rising, and since Cohon de-linked revenues and player compensation in the last collective bargaining agreement, he said six of the eight teams are either breaking even or making money. (He all but confirmed Hamilton and Toronto are the other two, saying, "We know we have work here in southern Ontario.")

Cohon has introduced drug testing, held payroll excesses in check -- "in 2007, I think a lot of you questioned whether I had the backbone to enforce the salary cap," he said -- and patched over the ownership holes with the help of the CFL's paterfamilias, David Braley. There are no revolutions anymore.

When it comes to this year, Cohon has happy numbers to spare, starting with the football. The league had the highest combined passer rating (93.5) in league history, though it was accomplished by an awful lot of 30-and-over quarterbacks. Scoring was up, passing yardage was up, and incredibly, more than half the league's games were decided in the final three minutes. There was something to sell, and Cohon cited sponsorship and merchandising numbers that indicated as much.

Now, it's not all double-digit rocket ships. Attendance rose 1.5 per cent; TV ratings were up six per cent on TSN, which was reduced to four per cent if you included RDS, which meant an average national audience of 728,000 per game. Cohon listed off number after number, none perhaps more significant than the news that the league's TV viewers are actually getting a little younger.

At some point, it should be admitted that in this fractious, rambunctious, unique little league of ours, Cohon has built a case as the best commissioner since Jake Gaudaur, who presided over the league from 1968 to 1984. The question, then: Other than a stadium solution for the Toronto Argonauts, and a new TV deal, what's left for him to do? Will Cohon push this league too far from its lovable, sometimes wacky, human-scale roots? He says he won't.

"We are continually trying to become one of the most professional sports leagues in North America," Cohon said. "But I want to say to you -- it's not about becoming corporate. We will never lose those things that are important to us -- accessibility, authenticity, and affordability. We owe that to our fans."

As for his own future, Cohon said, "I'm happy where I am, I'm challenged, and I hope to around for a while, while I'm still challenged." The challenges include the TV contract, expansion, Toronto, all that. It will also include finding a replacement for the irreplaceable Braley, should Cohon stick around long enough.

But the big one will be the future itself. The CFL fan base isn't getting as old as you might think -- Adrian Sciarra, the vice-president of commercial assets, says it is essentially aging at the same rate as the Canadian population in general -- but this is a league that has stayed the same as pro sports has exploded, and more than once we have all wondered whether the CFL will be left behind. The good times are here right now, but Sciarra warns, "When you look at our league in 10 or 15 years, it'll kind of be predicated on what we're doing now to refill the younger fans." Like its quarterbacks, there needs to be a next generation.

So the commish talks about apps, about video games, about fantasy football, about technology, about families. It's a big job, even an existential one. Mark Cohon is eternally boyish, especially when he smiles. Now he just needs to make sure his league stays young, too.

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